In meetings with more than a few people, all meeting participants are not “relevant” to each person at all times. Each person in the meeting could have a different set of “relevant” people in the meeting whom they care about. For example, the person who is talking might be the most “relevant” to all others at that moment. But the person who is being talked to (the one listening) can be “relevant” too. Because of the nature of the meeting, a decision maker in the meeting could also be “relevant” to an observer. Or, to a person, the reaction of their boss in the meeting might be “relevant”. During the meeting, participants have to keep track of who is most “relevant” at that moment—e.g. whose reaction needs to be observed
In online meetings, where all people are remotely participating, there are additional constraints which make this task more difficult. Due to limitations in the available bandwidth and due to limitations in the available display space, not every person in the meeting can see every other person in the meeting at the same time. By the virtue of these limitations, a subset of people in the online meeting can be seen by the others. Since the online meeting is being conducted in a virtual space, noticing the non-verbal cues (body language) of these “relevant” subset of people in the meeting is even more important.
To remedy this, most current online meeting tools provide an option to focus on the loudest talker. Some online meeting tools additionally provide an option to show a set of up to a number of (e.g. 10) pre-selected individuals simultaneously. But these tools have several limitations. One limitation of these tools is that they only use “audio activity” to determine who is “relevant”—that is, they assume that the loudest talker is the most “relevant” person. Even if the online meeting tool provides an option to show more than one person simultaneously, the tool usually does not allow the participants in the meeting to choose their own set of “relevant” people—that is, people have to see the participants who were pre-selected by the tool or by the organizer. Another disadvantage of the current online meeting tools is that the set of “relevant” people in the meeting is not personalized automatically for each participant—so participants have to compile their “relevant” set themselves throughout the meeting. Additionally, when someone new joins an ongoing meeting, it takes a few minutes before that new person understands the dynamics of the ongoing meeting and before that new person determines whom to focus on during the meeting.